[crazygringo]

Here's an alternate interpretation: they're watching television now rather than movies. Because the kind of character development and depth of storytelling that can happen in 20 or 50 or 80 hours goes far beyond what you can do in 2 or 3.

And the idea that young people can't watch long things due to a lack of attention goes directly against the evidence of the increasing habit of binge watching.

Forget about watching a mere movie for just 2 hours at a time. Try 4 or 5 hours instead, where you can cover almost half a season of a drama. You immerse yourself in the world for an entire evening, the way people used to do with novels.

[saucymew]

Great point, ultimately we're describing two different outcomes on where the current audience are spending their time on vs movies.

You posit television series, if I could add to that list, it'd be live streams, YouTube, Discord, etc.

All of these competing content genres are eroding the cultural cache and expected value of long film projects.

[dragonwriter]

> All of these competing content genres are eroding the cultural cache and expected value of long film projects.

Serialized (as opposed to episodic) TV series are long film projects; crafted in ~10-hour chunks rather than ~2 hour ones.

[slyall]

But I wonder if their knowledge of TV is also as deep.

When I was a kid the TV was filled up with a lot of repeats of TV shows. Things that had been create 10,20 or even 40 years before. I'd watch them because there were not many other options (probably because new shows were too expensive to waste on offpeak timeslots)

I wonder what percentage of today's kids would recognize any of the below shows beyond the name (or more-recent revivals) let alone have watched a large number of episodes.

https://www.classic-tv.com/shows/decade/1960s

or even:

https://www.classic-tv.com/shows/decade/1990s

[glandium]

As someone born at the end of the 70s, and not anywhere near the US, I was kind of surprised by how many of those 60s shows I knew. (which also says I never realized they were that old...)

[runnerup]

For me the sweet spot has always been miniseries like band of brothers, where it’s basically an 8-12 hour long movie.

[OfSanguineFire]

Among younger generations, binge-watching is very frequently done by having the video going in one window, while doing something else like Discord in another window. Or having the video playing on a laptop while browsing TikTok on one’s phone. It is no counterevidence for declining attention spans.

[crazygringo]

Do you have actual evidence for that?

Because sure, if you've got Property Brothers on in the background while you do other stuff, that makes sense. You can go in and out.

But if you're watching Squid Game, or The Last of Us, or Yellowjackets, or even Wednesday -- you'd better be paying attention to every frame. Modern dramatic TV demands your full attention in a way that The Golden Girls didn't.

The idea that younger generations are binge-watching Yellowjackets while browsing TikTok doesn't make any sense.